Douglas Adams Quotes

To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

Religion works on some people but not on everyone, because it says, 'Stop thinking and accept what I tell you.' That's not valid for people who want to think and reflect.

All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.

What do we believe? Why do we believe it?

I think that there's a strain in journalism that believes that anyone who surrenders him- or herself to faith and to belief necessarily checks reason and rationality at the door.

When a man is required to believe certain doctrines, he is not free to think. A creed is to keep the mind from inquiry. Questions lead to doubt, and doubt is the death of faith.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make-believe.

Many people operate as though the definition of faith were, Don't ask questions, just believe. They quote Jesus himself, who taught his followers to have the faith of a child (Mark 10:15). But I once heard Francis Schaeffer respond by saying, "Don't you realize how many questions children ask?"

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

A man must not only have faith but intellectual faith too. To make a man take up everything and believe it, would be to make him a lunatic.

If we believe not with faith divine and supernatural, we believe not at all.

What did I really think fifteen years ago? A nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of all those believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in the right, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take an aspirin: It can't hurt and you might get better.

Doubting everything and believing everything are two equally convenient solutions that guard us from having to think

Belief is tricky because left to its own devices, it can court a kind of surety, an unquestioning allegiance that fears doubt and destroys difference.

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.

It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.

No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes

Religion?" Mr Kumar grinned broadly. "I don't believe in religion. Religion is darkness.

Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty . . . exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the . . . false to achieve primacy over the facts.

The evaporation of 4 million who believe in this crap would leave the world a better place.

There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said 'Faith is believing what you know ain't so'.